Changing from IDE to SATA

[4ndy89]

Hi guys, when building my latest setup I decided to economise a bit as I had 6 brand new 160gb Maxtor IDE drives lying around. Lately I've noticed a bit of a grinding noise coming from the primary drive, which is a shocker as its basically 2 months old!

My current setup is as follows :

Intel C2D E6420
Asus P5N-E SLI
2x 160gb IDE HDD
2x IDE DVD/RW
BFG 8800 GTS 320mb
2GB Crucial Ballistix PC6400

Anyway, my question is, will I notice a huge difference if I changed my HDD's to SATA

 

[mosfet]

Totally depends on the drive itself. The interface really won't help you unless it clears a bottleneck. Since PATA IDE is still quite fast you won't notice any speed increase on similar drives.

The biggest difference will be in cabling and future saleability and availability of replacements.

 

[4ndy89]

At the moment I can't help but think that the drives are slowing down the rest of the system.

Right they are "Maxtor DiamondMax 17 160 GB - ATA-133"

Drive Transfer Rate: 133 MBps (external)
Seek Time: 8.9 ms (average)
Average Latency: 4.17 ms
Spindle Speed: 7200 rpm

Will a SATA drive offer much of a real world improvement over these? if so, what do you recommend?

 

[mosfet]

Like I said, it depends on the drive, not the interface.

I, like most people on here, would recommend a Western Digital 5000AAKS or Seagate 7200.10 500 drive. Both are very fast, native SATA, 500GB drives that should give you a noticable speed increase over your current Maxtors for about £65